1940s
November 20, 1947: Day of joy that led to lifetime of devotion
Theirs was a romance that beguiled a nation. Britain, weary of war and the austerity years that followed, was as much in love with the idea of a Royal Wedding as Elizabeth and Philip were with each other.
The young couple did not disappoint. The morning of November 20, 1947, dawned cold, but 21-year-old Princess Elizabeth and her handsome groom, Prince Philip, lit up London with a dazzling display of ceremony and splendour. What brought true warmth to the day was the knowledge that theirs was a love match.
Today, 70 years later, it still is. It has survived decades of tumultuous change in British society and provided a refuge for them both through Royal scandals and disasters. While the marriages of three of their children have failed, theirs has endured, a beacon of constancy and affection, the Daily Mail reports.
The Queen is now 91 and the Duke of Edinburgh 96. She fell in love with him in 1939 when she was just 13 and he was an 18-year-old Naval cadet.
By 1946 he could be found speeding on to the forecourt of Buckingham Palace in his black MG sports car in a tearing hurry to see the woman he called “Lilibet”.
For their wedding at Westminster Abbey, Elizabeth wore a Norman Hartnell duchesse satin gown inspired by a Boticelli painting. It sparkled with 10,000 seed pearls, tiny crystals and tulle embroidery.
Her headpiece was her ‘something borrowed’, the angular diamonds of the Queen Mary fringe tiara from the jewellery collection of the Queen Mother.
After their wedding, the couple set up home in Clarence House and Prince Charles arrived in 1948.
They then spent several blissful months on the Mediterranean island of Malta where Prince Philip was stationed with the Royal Navy.
As a surprise for their 60th wedding anniversary he took Elizabeth back there, and also to Broadlands in Hampshire where they had spent their wedding night.
It says much about their lasting love that the Queen dressed for the occasion in the same strand of pearls and the same brooch she wore in 1947 when she was his newly-wed wife.
1950s
Not just a wife and mother but a monarch too
Elizabeth had just four years as a wife and three as a mother before she became monarch.
Although she grew up knowing she would inherit the throne, her accession came far earlier than she – or Philip – had expected.
On February 6, 1952, Princess Elizabeth was in Kenya when she learned that her father, King George VI, had been found dead in bed. It was Philip who broke the news, and he who was by her side as she hastened home to London.
Supporting his wife through her grief, he also had to face his own. Becoming consort to the newly made Queen meant the end of his Royal Navy career and any kind of freedom or privacy.
He dealt with it by assuming the chairmanship of her Coronation Commission to ensure the ancient ceremony, set for June 2, 1953, was as compelling a spectacle as any in history.
The Queen chose another gown by Norman Hartnell, this time incorporating the emblems of her kingdom – the rose, thistle, leek and shamrock – and those of her Dominions.
After she was crowned, Prince Philip was the first of her subjects to pay homage to her. Among the 8,251 congregation was their four-year-old son, Prince Charles.
Princess Anne was too young to attend. But this idyllic image of a young, modern family at the helm of British public life was soon to be fractured by the realities of the Queen’s constitutional precedence over her new husband.
The couple had already been forced to move into Buckingham Palace, where Philip found he had neither an office nor staff. He chafed at the protocols which demanded he walk behind his wife and which banned his children from taking his surname.
In 1956 he took the unusual step of sailing to Australia for the opening of the Olympic Games, a four-month sea voyage that led to speculation about marital tensions at home.
If indeed there were any, they had been resolved by the time the couple were reunited in Lisbon.
The Queen and her staff awaited him wearing fake beards, teasing the Duke about the whiskers he had grown while at sea.
Around the Royal couple swirled years of dynamic change – rock ’n’ roll, Britain becoming a nuclear power, the four-minute mile, the start of the space age and the conquest of Everest.
Prince Philip, with his love of science and technology, of progress and modernity, was perfectly placed to help the Queen, as Head of State, navigate her way through it.
On the day of their wedding, King George had confided in a guest: “One day Elizabeth will be Queen and he will be consort. That’s much harder than being King but I think he’s the man for the job.”
This was the decade which swiftly proved him right.
1960s
Perfect team at work – and play
It was in the 1960s that the Queen and Prince Philip would show off the complementary skills
that would ultimately make them one of the best double acts of all time.
This was the decade in which they grew into their new, twin roles on the world stage, starting with a truly majestic, almost imperial, visit to India in 1961 featuring a tiger hunt and a royal procession like no other – in howdahs on the back of robed and crowned elephants.
It was in stark contrast to an earlier trip to Malta in which they’d relished the informality of riding among crowds of schoolchildren in an open-top Land Rover. What it demonstrated was their deft ability to do both.
Despite being a working mother with two small children – Prince Andrew was born in 1960 and Prince Edward in 1964 – and two teenagers, the Queen retained her handspan waist and English rose complexion.
The Duke, tall, blond and devoted to hard exercise on horseback, sailing, swimming or hiking, was strikingly handsome. They were one of the most glamorous couples of the era, outshining heads of state at white-tie banquets, and Hollywood stars on the red carpet.
They worked tirelessly together. The Duke’s intellect, his grasp of politics and his stated aim of making people laugh within 15 seconds of meeting them made him an invaluable aide to the Queen.
This was a side of Royal life the public was finally permitted to see in the 1960s, as the monarch and her husband edged towards a new era of openness. First came informal snapshots of the Queen without the trappings of majesty, simply as a wife and mother, and then in 1969 the first ever fly-on-the-wall Royal TV documentary.
The BBC programme showed the Royals as an ordinary family with the Duke barbecuing sausages and the Queen having to mollify Prince Edward with sweets after Prince Charles snapped a cello string against his cheek. The nation, amused and amazed, was glued to its screen.
1970s
Sailing into an age of modern royalty
The work which had begun in the 1960s to modernise the monarchy picked up speed in the 1970s, to the relief of the ever-progressive Prince Philip. Public deference was waning, popularity had to be earned, as did the Civil List. The Royal couple set about proving their inestimable value.
It was during their Antipodean tour of 1971 that the Walkabout was born, the Queen and the Duke straying from their tightly managed schedule in Wellington to mingle with the crowds, shaking hands and chatting. An accepted part of Royal life today, it was a groundbreaking departure back then.
In 1972 the couple’s Silver Wedding Anniversary was intended to be a low-key celebration, but the Queen’s subjects were so excited by the occasion they showered her with cards and gifts.
The Monarch felt compelled to issue a message of personal thanks in that year’s annual Christmas broadcast.
“We are especially grateful to the many thousands who have written to us and sent us messages and presents. One of the great Christian ideals is a happy and lasting marriage between man and wife, but no marriage can hope to succeed without a deliberate effort to be tolerant and understanding,” she said.
Given her own husband’s reputation for being quick to temper, she clearly knew what she was talking about.
In keeping with the spirit of the times, the anniversary picture released by the couple was not a stuffy Royal portrait but an image so fresh it still carries the tang of saltwater today. They are caught in an intimate moment smiling lovingly at each other on the deck of the Royal Yacht Britannia.
There were many other successful overseas tours, notably a glittering state visit to Washington DC in 1976 to meet President Gerald Ford at the White House. There was, however, trouble at home.
The late 1970s was a time of recession. Courtiers feared the country might be feeling too downcast to celebrate the Queen’s Silver Jubilee in 1977. They were demonstrably wrong.
Her Jubilee tour started in Scotland and ended ten weeks later in Northern Ireland. On the evening of June 6, she lit a bonfire in Windsor Great Park, which was followed by a chain of 100 other beacons across the country.
The next day she and the Duke took the Gold State Coach, in which they’d ridden at her Coronation, for a service of thanksgiving at St Paul’s Cathedral. Hundreds of thousands lined the route and 500 million watched on television worldwide. It was a triumph.
Their family life was flourishing too as they saw the first of their children get married and make them grandparents. Princess Anne’s wedding in 1973 was followed by the birth of Peter Phillips in 1977.
These years also delivered Britain’s first female Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher – the age of feminism finally catching up with the Queen, a woman who’d been Head of State for more than a quarter of a century.
Many would view the Duke as the prototype for the breed of New Man which would follow – a career secondary to his wife’s work and doing the lion’s share of the parenting.
Astutely, Her Majesty recognised this would never have been the Duke’s choice. In private, she made a point of always deferring to her husband, whom she considered the head of her household. On the eve of the 1980s, they remained as much in love as ever.
1980s
Weddings, births and beaming grandparents
For the Queen and Prince Philip, the 1980s promised much and delivered even more – with one headline-grabbing happy family event after another. The decade began with the show-stopping romance between their eldest son, the Prince of Wales, and 19-year-old Lady Diana Spencer.
They wed on July 29, 1981, amid a frenzy of global excitement and an outpouring of patriotic pride.
The people’s love for the Queen and her husband was revived by the coming of a new and glamorous generation of young Royals. The “Charles and Di” phenomenon gilded them as both successful parents and guardians of the monarchy’s future.
The arrival of an heir to the throne, Prince William in 1982, and his brother Prince Harry in 1984, was further cause for national congratulation.
Behind palace walls the Queen exhaled: Charles was married and had given the House of Windsor an heir and a spare.
Princess Anne already had two children and, once Prince Andrew made Sarah Ferguson his bride and added two more little princesses to the gang, there was only Edward to go. They didn’t look just like a dynasty, but a big, jolly family too.
These betrothals, weddings and pregnancies, the appearances of Windsor wives on hospital steps clutching new babies in beautifully crocheted blankets, and the good-humoured christenings which followed, all fed a national appetite for glamour. Diana alone was enough to transfix the world. Royal business was booming.
Despite their own advance into middle age, the Queen and the Duke showed no sign of slowing down.
By the middle of the decade they were approaching retirement age but they, of course, had both signed up for a lifetime of service, the Queen to her country and Philip to his wife.
Investitures, state visits, garden parties at Buckingham Palace and Holyroodhouse, Remembrance Day services, Trooping the Colour and the State Opening of Parliament were all knitted into diaries which contained hundreds of individual and joint Royal engagements annually.
The Duke may have permitted himself the odd joke about being Britain’s best ribbon-cutter but he and the Queen both nourished hundreds of charities with their patronage and were proud supporters of all three military services.
With their family flourishing and their working life ever more assured, the popularity of The Firm seemed to be unassailable.
It was not – within a few short years the Charles and Diana fairy tale turned so toxic it would test the Queen and the Duke as never before.
1990s
A smile amid the storms of their most turbulent decade
Every decade of the Queen’s reign has seen its own trials. But there can be no doubt about which the monarch and her husband consider the hardest of their lives together: the 1990s.
These were testing years for the couple as scandal after scandal unfurled as surely as the Royal standard at the top of a breezy flagpole. Most of them came in 1992, the year the Queen would memorably refer to as her annus horribilis.
By then the War of the Waleses was at its poisonous height, with revelations about the infidelities of both the Prince and Princess of Wales. In her de facto autobiography Diana: Her True Story, Diana also sensationally disclosed her battles with bulimia and self-harm.
The warring couple’s separation came that year, as did Princess Anne’s divorce and the Duchess of York being caught topless having her toes sucked by a man she had claimed was her financial adviser.
It was also 1992 when Windsor Castle, the place the Queen most considers home, was ravaged by fire. The monarch was devastated but received less sympathy than she might have expected.
It says much about people’s disappointment with her children that the country made it clear the public purse should be snapped shut, and she should pay for repairs to the Royal residence herself. The Duke of Edinburgh remained steadfastly beside her, comforting and counselling her.
Ever the pragmatist, he helped the Queen draw up plans to open Buckingham Palace to fund the work needed at Windsor and exchanged a flurry of fond, frank and helpful letters with Diana in a heroic attempt to rebuild a working relationship with her.
Five years later she would die in a high-speed car crash in Paris alongside her new lover, Dodi Al Fayed, plunging her former mother and father-in-law into crisis once more.
The loss of Diana in such tragic circumstances and the PR disaster that followed – the Royals’ delay in returning from Balmoral to lead national mourning, the absence of a flag flying at half mast over Buckingham Palace – exposed them as being out of touch. Royal popularity was at its lowest ebb.
Shortly before Christmas that year, at a ceremony to decommission the Royal Yacht Britannia, the Queen was caught crying on camera. Clearly she was weeping for all that the yacht represented – the happy family holidays and the respite it offered from the burdens of the Crown.
As ever, her devoted husband was by her side in support. He was there again on the eve of the new millennium when they toasted the arrival of the year 2000 and, although they did not know it then, an extraordinary change in their fortunes.
2000s
By her side, always and for ever
The new millennium has brought delight after delight to the Queen and Prince Philip: two more grandchildren, a tumble of great-grandchildren, Golden and Diamond Jubilees, their 90th birthdays and her milestone achievement becoming the longest-ever reigning British monarch.
Now, there is this, the 70th anniversary of a marriage that has defined their lives and service to the country.
These autumn years have also brought them the contentment of seeing the Prince of Wales finally marrying his long-time love, Camilla Parker Bowles, and a sense of the coming succession with the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton and the birth of Prince George.
There has even been a kind of national catharsis over the death of Diana 20 years ago.
The emotional honesty with which her sons William and Harry marked that sad anniversary seems to have finally laid their mother’s ghost to rest.
It all means that the monarchy over which the Queen presides with Philip’s unwavering help is more popular now than at any point since her Coronation. No wonder she is pictured smiling a lot.
Coronation smiles… but the Queen almost forgot her orb and sceptre.
